The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of each author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management. IBM reserves the right to remove content deemed inappropriate.

This week IBM welcomes more than a hundred technology and industry analysts to the 11th annual IBM Software Group Analyst Insights event in Stamford, Conn. The two-day conference brings together IBM executives, industry thought leaders and subject matter experts to discuss the latest market dynamics, trending technology and emerging client opportunities. We’ll be posting highlights from today’s main tent and break-out sessions.

---

Wrapping up today’s general session, Mike Rhodin, senior vice president and head of the IBM Software Solutions Group, picked up where Robert left off to describe how IBM is leveraging client-focused capabilities to deliver end-to-end client solutions.

---

The complexity of business (and its supporting processes) has never been greater. More than a trillion gigabytes of data live in our digital world, a figure that’s grown exponentially thanks to the proliferation of mobile and social technologies. Mike pointed to two recent milestones by Twitter and Facebook as evidence – the former now supports 500 million tweets per day while the latter surpassed one billion active users.

---

This wealth of social, mobile and localized content – primarily in the form of videos, blogs and other social media updates – has created an “information age like none before” that poses some tough new challenges for every organizational leader.

---

“As Robert mentioned, we’ve conducted a number of C-level studies with thousands of Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Financial OfficersChief HR Officers and other line of business leaders,” said Rhodin. “What we found during these conversations was a treasure trove of requirements, by role and industry, that allow us to understand the issues facing senior leaders outside of the IT department.”

---

A central theme throughout Mike’s remarks – one echoed earlier by Steve and Robert – is the pivotal role of advanced analytics in today’s increasingly complex world. According to Mike, this explosion of data is causing clients to step back and rethink their entire functions and the processes they execute every day, recognizing there’s a more intelligent way to run their business.

---

“There’s an underlying pattern emerging across every solution space and industry, whether its public sector, finance, insurance or others,” said Rhodin. “From an engineering standpoint, once you’ve found the right pattern you can design software and systems to automate and optimize around it.”

---

Mike went on to highlight how IBM is helping these new line of business clients start to “weave intelligence into the fabric of their organizations” by instrumenting, interconnecting and analyzing vast quantities of data to identify new patterns. This is a common thread woven across IBM's entire Smarter Planet portfolio including emerging areas such as Smarter Analytics, Smarter Commerce, Social Business, Smarter Cities and Watson.

---

Mike covered far more ground than this author could adequately capture in this space. We're hoping to amend this post shortly with a full replay of today's remarks.